Creation and AI: A New Era for the Artist
Progress series © Justine Van den Driessche
In history, technical advancements have continually redefined the boundaries of artistic creation. Today, how do we, as artists, approach the tools of AI in our creative processes? What role and status do we attribute to them in contemporary creation? This article offers a reflection on the emerging relationship between the artist and AI, exploring the questions it raises and the new dialogues it establishes between technology and artistic practice.
The Collaborative Tool and Virtual Assistant of Creation
What is a tool in the artistic context? Historically, a tool is an extension of the hand, a vector that amplifies the artist's intention and allows them to reach new forms. With AI, however, the tool takes on a dimension that is both autonomous and dependent. AI is not limited to execution: it assists, proposes, and sometimes surprises. It oscillates between the status of an object and that of a partner, an ambivalence that reflects the paradoxes of our capitalist age, where technology embodies both progress and a new form of subordination. This context fits into a history where humans progressively delegate some of their capabilities to external devices. Yet, this collaboration raises essential questions: Can AI truly be considered an assistant, or does it remain a sophisticated tool without its own subjectivity?
A Dynamic Material to Shape
Thanks to sophisticated algorithms, AI analyzes immense corpora, proposes infinite variations, and generates images, sounds, or texts. However, it is not infallible. Its imperfections, far from being incidental, reveal its limitations and the dangers it may pose. In medicine, for example, biased diagnoses have been attributed to unbalanced data; in psychology, models have reproduced societal prejudices. In these contexts, as in art, AI depends entirely on the data and frameworks we provide it.
In artistic creation, these flaws become opportunities: AI, more than just a tool to master, could be viewed as a dynamic material to shape. If every material carries a form of life within it, perhaps AI, with its unpredictable behaviors and imperfections, becomes a dynamic extension of human imagination.
AI as the Artist’s Mirror – A New Reflection?
In artistic practice, AI acts as a mirror: it amplifies the creator's intentions while introducing unexpected elements. The generative inconsistencies in the images created by AI can become key elements in art. These deviations between the creator’s initial intentions and the results obtained reflect both the limits of the mechanism and the detours of the unconscious of the one who initiated the prompt.
This raises the question: what do we say to AI, and what does AI say about us? When we think we’re providing a clear instruction, the multiplicity of interpretations possible by the machine returns us to our own relativity. Moreover, it can be unsettling to see how closely the images AI generates from our words resemble us.
For instance, in my series Les Progrès, most of the generated images did not match the aesthetics and setups I initially sought. Where I, as a beginner with this generative tool, thought I was simply engaging in an academic exercise of style, I did not expect this work to resonate with something deeper, tied to my personal experience. As the production progressed, the more I reformulated my prompts, the more the AI seemed to learn about me. Strange images emerged where, without explicit autobiographical intention, I saw scenes extrapolated and fanciful depictions of my own youth—landscapes, places, people who resembled those I had known in my life, even though consciously my memory hadn’t actively sought to recall them. This process produced representations as odd as they were curious, in its strange dialogue with art history.
In interpreting my prompts, AI conveys both explicit information and unconscious nuances, thus creating a virtual double of my thought. This interaction highlights a tension between the conscious control of the artist and the randomness of the generative process. Accidents and randomness become materials to shape, revealing unexpected dimensions of creation, in a dialogue between the initial intention, the unconscious part conveyed by the artist, and the randomness of the generative process.
Collaborator or Co-Author?
One of the central questions raised by AI in art concerns the status of the author. If the artist remains the decision-maker, guiding aesthetic and conceptual choices, can AI be considered a co-author?
AI’s production depends entirely on the data and recommendations provided by the artist: prompts, instructions, selections, and adjustments. These parameters impose a precise framework, and the artist plays a decision-making role at every stage of the process. In this sense, AI is an indispensable collaborator but lacks conceptual autonomy.
This collaboration redefines the role of the artist as an editor and shaper of the possibilities offered by the machine. This constant dialogue between human and AI opens unexplored horizons, while requiring an ethical reflection on the responsibility and limits of this interaction.
A New Artistic Paradigm
Collaboration with AI reshapes the boundaries of creation. It invites artists to reconsider originality, intention, and emotion in their works. It also raises questions about the notion of the "augmented author," whose aesthetic convictions must guide the generative process to give meaning to this collaboration.
While AI generates anxiety and concerns about the place of the human in the field of creation, raising both ethical, sociological, and political questions about the distribution of labor between humans and machines, as well as the identity of the author, it nonetheless remains a remarkable opportunity to rethink our relationship with imagination and artistic material.
As a partner in the reinvention of artistic practice, AI pushes us to explore new forms of expression and question our role in this creative dialogue between technology and human sensitivity.